TV REVIEW : Ballerina Karen Kain Profiled on Bravo

Everybody in dance likes Karen Kain--and the hourlong profile on Bravo at 6 and 11 tonight shows why.

At 38, this beautifully proportioned, splendidly trained Canadian ballerina dances an extremely wide range of roles with the same remarkable skill and intelligence.

Indeed, versatility may be Kain’s strongest asset since, individually, the performance excerpts collected here lack an indelible interpretive dimension. They are excellent but not definitive and thus the title of the telecast--”Karen Kain: Prima Ballerina”--seems an overstatement. Shouldn’t a true prima be incomparable in some thing?

For a classical ballerina of her rank, Kain dances a doubly unusual repertory here: mostly late-20th-Century pieces, but not anything by Balanchine, Ashton, Tudor or Robbins. Instead, she joins principals from National Ballet of Canada and Ballet de Marseille in fatuous oddities by Ronald Hynd (“The Merry Widow”) and Roland Petit (“Proust” a.k.a. “Les Intermittences du coeur”), along with ephemera by Eliot Feld (“Echo”) and Glen Tetley (“La Ronde”).

Carefully introduced, a clip from Tetley’s compelling “Alice” is just too brief and confusing to support the emotional weight of Kain’s narration. Similarly, her remarks about the importance of feeling in “Swan Lake” are undercut by her icy performance with Serge Lavoie of the White Swan pas de deux.

Tributes from colleagues and choreographers complete the program: a kind of prologue to the March 18 Bravo showing of the complete National Ballet of Canada “Merry Widow,” studio-taped in 1987 with Kain and guest artist John Meehan in the leading roles.

In this three-act, 1975 ballet adaptation of Franz Lehar’s operetta, nobody seems able to dance without holding onto bottles, glasses, scarfs, fans, documents, capes or other merchandise--and Hynd himself proves incapable of creating a single idiomatic waltz.

Kain spends a lot of time being carried aloft but manages to look graceful even in the most ungainly lifts. In the final waltz-duet, Meehan must hoist her while they both hold champagne glasses: a moment that brings together all of Hynd’s ghastly preoccupations at their most spectacularly awkward.

Now artistic director of Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Meehan makes a dashing consort and there are bright performances, too, by Yoko Ichino and Raymond Smith. Norman Campbell directed both programs expertly.